Setting and Research Question

• Setting:
  • Municipalieies in Turkey
  • Municipal Elections 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019
  • Parties: Governing party (AKP), Second-largest party (CHP), Kurdish party
  • AKP is an Islamic-conservative party, Kurdish parties promote gender equality

• Institutional/Electoral Background:
  • 900 municipalities are governed by an appointed governor and an elected council and mayor.
  • Parties submit a master (and replacement list), as well as a special quota list used to add members until the plurality-winning party has a majority in the council. This list is much less salient to voters.

Share of Women

Share of Women by Party

Hypothesis and Mechanisms

If that is the case, a number of mechanisms could be at play:

• Electoral Competition: If a party is challenged electorally, it will try to run its best candidates in the next election. Assuming present discrimination in the AKP, this would force the party to look to qualified women that were previously disregarded.
• Response to the Kurdish party championing women’s rights: The AKP may realize that the Kurdish party emphasizes women’s rights and voters respond well to this position. They may then copy the position to not lose this part of the electorate.
• Belief Updating: AKP officials may see that women in elected positions can actually do the work and then update their previously held beliefs that men are more fit for the job, leding to them running more women the next time.

Empirical Approach

• Main Research Question
  • The outcome is the share of women in an AKP master list running in a given election year and municipality. The treatment is the Kurdish party winning in the previous election (5 years prior). They control for province.
  • Treatment is staggered and may occur at multiple times, hence they use the estimator by De Chaisemartin and d’Haultfoeuille (2023), which compares “switchers” to not-yet-“switchers” in a given period.
  • Additional controls are the size of the AKP’s master list, whether the Kurdish party submits a list, and demographics. SE are clustered at the province level. The sample is all elections that AKP contested.
• Mechanisms
  • They investigate whether pure electoral competition is the reason by running the same but using a CHP win as the treatment. They investigate whether learning about women’s abilities is the reason by using the special quota list as the outcome.

Summary Statistics

Balance

Main Results

Placebo

Mechanism

Summary of Findings